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How absurd it seems to people such as myself who spent decades teaching high school subjects such as math or science, who for decades graded Regents exams without all of this garbage.  Of course we re-read marginal papers; the grading of such papers is not brain surgery.  Student free responses as opposed to short answers were subject to interpretations and needed interpretations by professionals.  And two professionals could look at the same student response and cme up with slightly different scores and neither would be wrong.  Should a child fail because of the luck of the draw which teacher graded his or her paper?  And so we often gave a student the benefit of the doubt.  And nobody said we were cheating because we most assuredly were not.

The Regents exams were never meant, repeat never meant to evalute the effectiveness of a teacher or department or school.  They were simply intended to provide a uniform course of study throughout the tate so that a student taking a Chemistry Regents in Buffalo got and took pretty much the same course as a student taking the same subject in Brooklyn.  And it allowed SUNY to gauge the reliability of student grades.  A student getting a grade of 85 in general should get somewhat around 85 on the Regents exam.

Of course these were real Regents exams without cheat sheets and without inflated scoring tables where a student amassing 35% of the credits on an Algebra regents is considered to have passed.  We graded the papers yes and in some marginal cases may have pushed a tad but it was done as what all education should be about, in the best interests of the student not to make some bureaucrat happy and be able to brag about “improving” the results and “toughening” the standards.  How many students have needlessly failed these Regents exams because of this let’s not re-check to see if we missed something?

Am I glad I have long since retired and not have had to deal with this madness and that’s what it is madness.  We gave the Regents exams the proper respect and used them for what their intended purpose was and didn’t sit around comparing School A’s results with School B.

But then again, we were educators and professionals and more importantly worked for professionals and our supervisors wanted nothing less.  And we had real Principals not the kind Bloomberg seems to prefer.  I feel for those of you still working in this lunacy world where they are proud that marginal Regents exam papers are not re-read.  Good luck to you all.

 
 
“We have zero tolerance for cheating and all violators are disciplined,” Connie Pankratz, a spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Pankratz statement is an outrageous lie. How pathetic that Chancellor Walcott would trot out his version of Baghdad Bob to deny the obvious— under Mayor Bloomberg, and with the full cooperation of UFT Presidents Weingarten and Mulgrew, as well as NYSED, the DOE has tolerated and therefore encouraged Regents inflation. All the better to pump up graduation rates and pretend that reform was working. Whoever told Pankratz what to say must come forward and retract.

Nine years ago the New York Post published an anecdotal story on test tampering. (“Teachers Cheat: Inflating Regents Scores To Pass Kids,” January 26, 2004). In a next day follow-up Chancellor Klein remarked: “There better not be any fudging on the Regents numbers. I’m certainly prepared to enforce [the rules against cheating] . . . If people are trying once again to take shortcuts, we’ve got to put an end to that.” As if.

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal published an incriminating  sequel reporting that 5 to 10 percent of Regents passes were failures. The recently retired Klein cravenly took the Fifth with a no comment.  (“Students’ Regents Test Scores Bulge at 65,” February 2, 2011) Neither the Mayor, nor Walcott, nor Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky dared contest the Journal’s devastating findings that deflated the Mayor’s boast of historic grad rates.

After I publically confronted Walcott at an E4E meeting about his eyes wide shut denial of the city’s muted Regents scandal, Suransky graciously invited me to Tweed to hear my critique. I am sorry to say that he was relatively clueless. For example, he attempted to explain away the 65 bulge as an artifact of the state’s scoring rubric requiring a review of marks between 62 and 64. But that requirement pertained only to math exams, not humanities like English, Social Studies, etc. Further, in an email he downplayed the significance of the Journal’s claim that up to 10 percent of Regents passes were actually failures. “Students as you know retake exams that they fail so its impossible to accurately predict whether a student that got a passing grade of 65 – when they shouldn’t have – wouldn’t have graduated on time after re-taking the exam again later the same year if they had indeed failed. This is not the kind of tortured reasoning expected of an educator of Suransky’s stature.

What the city needs is a Truth Commission to get to the bottom of the perennial corruption behind Regents grading. Fat chance. Neither the Mayor, nor Tweed, nor UFT, none with clean hands, can stand the truth. At long last, increased security may put an end to Regents inflation. But there is another dirty little secret still corroding our schools—the unmentionable 65 bulge in course grades whose full disclosure would reveal an unimaginable achievement gap.  

Yes, and we all know there is no margin of error on these exams, and thus a significant difference exists (when speaking about the Regents exams) between a 64 and a 65, enough of a difference to prevent a student who otherwise meets the requirements from graduating, or to judge a teacher as “Ineffective.”

Plus students of today are given a cheat sheet because heaven forbid the poor little darlings should be required to learn the definitions of the 3 fundamental trig functions and also some idiots decreed students should not have to factor quadratic trinomials if the coefficient of the second degree term is greater than 1.  Among the ways the exam has been dumbed down.

But notice please that you can’t go to the State Ed web site and see the conversion table as well as the cheat sheet given to students.  It would be very embarassing.

Bloomberg has previously been accused of sexually harassing women under his employment, which he has denied.[65][66] In 1997 a former Bloomberg L.P. employee filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of having responded to her announcement to him that she was pregnant in 1995 by saying, “Kill it!” followed by “Great, No. 16″, which she cited a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company at the time.

In my school is wasn’t the teachers inflating the grades but the Administration.  We were told in the past to play with the numbers, try to get the grade to a 65 or 75 for college, the milk of human kindness should always be flowing, give the student the higher grade when  you’re stuck between two grades, can someone with a kind heart look at this test and try to bring the grade up?

Unless,  your supervisors are upset with your statistics, which keeps them from a bonus. Next step,  your administration will deeply scrutinize your practice so you can receive a U. They’ll start shopping around for a cheaper new teacher. Under the proposed evaluation system, two U’s in a row means, your out of a job!!  

The silver lining may be, for the state and city to reevaluate, how test scores should influence the rating of a teacher. There are too many variables here in the city.